A Lightweight AVR IDE

It’s entirely possible to do your coding in vim or emacs, hammering out hotkeys to drive the interface and bring your code to life. While working in such a way has its charms, it can be confronting to new coders, and that’s before even considering trying to understand command line compiler settings. The greenhorn coder may find themselves more at home in the warm embrace of an IDE, and [morrows_end] has now built one for those working with AVR assembly code.

The IDE goes by the name of Simple AVR IDE, or savr_ide for short. Programmed in C++ with the FLTK widget library, [morrows_end] has tested it on Windows XP, but notes that it should successfully compile for Linux, Unix, and even MacOS too.

All the basic features are there – there’s syntax highlighting, as well as integration with the AVRA assembler and AVRDUDE for programming chips. It’s a tool that could make taking the leap into assembly code just that little bit easier. For another taste of bare metal coding, check out [Ben Jojo]’s discussion of x86 bootloaders.

It doesn’t seem odd at all to me that some people’s preference might bend more towards a graphical ide. The idea of it being for beginners though does. How many beginners are writing in assembly? That just seems crazy to me.

“While working in such a way has its charms”… I’ve been a professional software engineer for more than 15 years and always preferred proper IDEs. VI(M), Emacs and similar editors never had any appeal to me, except for doing small edits on remote servers. To me all this “you’re only a real programmer if you refuse to use anything else than vi” is just a pissing contest. It says nothing about how good you’re actually in a professional environment.

Yah, you can ignore all that chest puffing about real programmers and vi. That’s just people with insecurities trying to make themselves feel superior. A “real” programmer doesn’t need to brag about their choice of editor or even brag at all. Their code does that talking for them. A “real” programmer can be quiet about their abilities and let their code speak for them. All the good programmers don’t have to rube it into other’s faces that they use emacs and only the rubes do not.